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The bizarre sight of the body of Jeremy Bentham, law reformer, scientist and philosopher, can be seen to this day mounted on display in University College London. Bentham was fascinated by mummification and believed that corpses, put on permanent display as memorials to the dead, or ‘auto icons’ as he called them, would become commonplace items in the houses of family and friends.
Prior to his death Bentham gave detailed instructions in his will about how his body should be preserved. He requested that his body be dissected, his bones be wired in a sitting position and his mummified corpse be dressed in his favourite black suit and straw hat, with his hand on his favourite walking stick, ‘Dapple’. Bentham’s preserved form is on display today in a case with glass sides. Apparently the mummification of his head was not successful, so it was removed and replaced by a wax head modelled in his likeness.
Over the years there have been various sightings of Bentham’s ghost walking the university corridors, tapping the floor with his cane or cradling his head in his arms.
BERMUDA TRIANGLE
Reports indicate that dozens of ships, twenty or so aeroplanes and a thousand people have mysteriously vanished in this restricted wedge of the ocean just east of Florida in the United States. The ocean region was named the Bermuda Triangle in 1945, after six airforce planes and their crews disappeared on a calm day in good flying conditions.
Although accidents and mysterious disappearances are to be expected at sea, the ones in this area are unusual because they often occur in good weather and no traces of wreckage or survivors are found. Just before disappearing, crews often report that nothing is amiss, and in rare instances ships have been found days later with their entire crews missing. The area is policed by the US government, but despite this the number of disappearances far exceeds the law of chance for such a relatively small area. This had led many investigators to believe that the ‘vanishments’ in this area are caused by some sort of paranormal force.
The mysterious history of the Bermuda Triangle reaches as far back as its first recorded traveller, Christopher Columbus. While sailing into the area, Columbus and his men were unnerved by bolts of lightning, strange lights and the erratic action of the compass spinning wildly.
Over the years the area became notorious for strange occurrences. Until World War II only ships were thought to be affected, but since then aeroplanes have also disappeared. All the most obvious causes - human error, weather and so forth - have been investigated, and by the mid-1970s logical explanations for virtually all the reported mysterious incidents had been uncovered. Despite this, the Bermuda Triangle - also known as the Devil’s Triangle and the Limbo of the Lost - continues to intrigue and defy rational explanation. Various incredible theories have been put forward to explain the disappearances, such as time warps, black holes, atmospheric aberrations, magnetic anomalies, alignments of the planets, tidal waves, earthquakes, hidden sea beings, death rays from outer space, forces emanating from Atlantis and alien abduction.
BERRY POMEROY CASTLE
This ruined castle, located at Berry Pomeroy, Devon has been the scene of ghostly sightings and strange phenomena for hundreds of years. Even today, visitors to the castle remark upon its strange atmosphere and the feelings of foreboding and terror it inspires.
The great majority of the hauntings can be traced to the castle’s original owners, the Pomeroy family, who occupied it from about 1086 to 1550. The most terrifying apparitions are those of a white and a blue lady. The White Lady is believed to haunt the dark dungeons. According to the legend, she is the spirit of Margaret Pomeroy, who was imprisoned in the dungeons by her sister Eleanor. Eleanor was jealous of both Margaret’s beauty and her success with men, and Margaret slowly starved in the dungeons, a long drawn-out and painful death. Perhaps Margaret’s agony is the source of the feeling of unease and horror some people experience at the castle.
The Blue Lady roams around the castle as she pleases and has been seen trying to lure people into parts of the ruin. According to some stories she is the ghost of the daughter of one of the Norman lords of the castle. She was raped by her father, who then strangled the resulting baby in one of the upper rooms. In other tales it is she who smothers the child, haunting the castle in anguish. When she is seen, her face is said to portray this suffering. She is regarded as a death portent to those who see her. The well-known nineteenth-century physician Sir Walter Farquar is said to have seen the spirit while he was attending to the wife of one of the castle stewards. The wife died soon afterwards, although she seemed to be making a full recovery.
Other apparitions reported include a woman in a grey dress, the ubiquitous cavalier and strange shadows that appear to have no earthly presence to cast them.
BHUT
In Hindu mythology a bhut is believed to be the restless ghost of someone who has died a violent death or committed suicide. According to legend, the bhut has no shadow and can be detected by the smell of burning turmeric. It is thought that lying on the ground offers protection against it, as the bhut never rests on the earth.
BIBLIOMANCY
A method of divination still popular today. Originally bibliomancy was used to discover if a person was innocent or guilty of a crime. The suspect was weighted against the great Bible in the local church. If the suspect weighed less, he or she was declared innocent. Later bibliomancy came to mean any divinatory use of the Bible, from resting it on a child’s head to calm him or her down to picking a verse at random to offer comfort and support. Finally, the term was used for divination from books in general, not just the Bible. Today we understand it as a method of divination that involves taking any book, usually a collection of prose or poetry or wise thoughts, closing one’s eyes, thinking about a particular problem or question, opening the book at random and interpreting the first words or sentences read in a prophetic or advisory way.
BLLOCATION
The appearance of a person or animal in two places at the same time. What exactly occurs in the phenomenon of bilocation is uncertain, but one theory is that a person’s double or doppelgänger is somehow projected elsewhere and becomes visible to others either in solid physical form or ghostly form. Generally the double remains silent or acts strangely. In folklore, bilocation sometimes presages or heralds the death of the individual seen.
Bilocation allegedly has been experienced and practised at will by mystics, ecstatics, saints, monks, holy persons and magical adepts. Several Christian saints and monks were skilled at bilocation, including St Antony of Padua, St Ambrose of Milan, St Severus of Ravenna, and Padre Pio of Italy. In 1774, St Alphonsus Liguori was seen at the bedside of the dying Pope Clement XIV, when in fact the saint was confined to his monastic cell in a location that was a four-day journey away.
Reports of bilocation were collected in the nineteenth century by pioneering psychical researcher Frederick Myers, one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research in England. Myers published his reports in 1903 in Human Personality and Its Survival after Bodily Death, but the phenomenon has received little interest in modern times.
Among the most remarkable of the documented cases of bilocation was the appearance of Friar Padre Pio in the air over San Giovanni Rotondo during World War II. While southern Italy remained in Nazi hands, American bombers were given the job of attacking the city of San Giovanni Rotondo. However, when they appeared over the city and prepared to unload their munitions, a brown-robed friar appeared before their aircraft. All attempts to release the bombs failed. In this way Padre Pio kept his earlier promise to the citizens that their town would be spared. Later on, when an American airbase was established at Foggia, a few miles away, one of the pilots of this incident visited the friary and found, to his great surprise, the little friar he had seen in the air that day over San Giovanni.
As to how Padre Pio accomplished such a feat, the closest he ever came to an explanation of bilocation was to say that it occurred ‘by an extension of his personality’.
BINDELOF SOCIETY
In spring of 1932 a group of American teenage boys began to experiment with table tilting. One of the boys had been associated with poltergeist activity a few years previously, and both he and his mother were fascinated by psychic phenomena. To their delight, the boys were able to get the table to tilt, then to lift off the floor and then to rise high into the air.
New York psychiatrist and dream researcher Montague Ullman visited the group in September 1932, and a regular schedule of meetings was drawn up. All regular sitters were aged between 15 and 17 years old. The teenagers would sit around a table in a dark room, their hands resting on the table and their feet underneath, for a period of 15 to 20 minutes, then there would be a break followed by another 15 to 20 minutes. After several sessions the group began to produce table tiltings and raps on a regular basis, and they decided to attempt psychic photography. When this became routine they turned their hand to another way to induce psychic phenomena. A pen and pencil were simply placed on a table and communication invited. It wasn’t long before writing could be heard and lengthy written messages appeared. The communicator identified himself as the deceased Dr Bindelof, who found himself able to use the psychic force the teenagers were generating to communicate with them. From that point on a dialogue was set up, and Dr Bindelof answered questions about the psychic world and the nature of the soul. By 1933 the Bindelof Society was formed.
Not all the boys were convinced that Dr Bindelof was who or what he said he was, and some thought they themselves were creating this entity through thought alone. None, however, doubted that the experience was real, and it was one they would never forget. The group split up around 1934, but in 1949 the core members met again to recreate the phenomena, this time without success. Attention now turned to making a permanent record of what had occurred, and the eventual product of this was a series of articles published by Montague Ullman in Exceptional Human Experience in 1993 and 1994.
BIOENERGETICS
Bioenergetics, like acupuncture and acupressure, assumes the existence of a universal life force that affects health and wellbeing, and a capacity for self-healing within everyone. It is a form of psychotherapy that involves a high degree of intuitive awareness on the part of the therapist, and patients have been known to report psychic experiences, such as episodes of clairvoyance, as a result.
Bioenergetics works with the physical, emotional and mental patterns of men and women to reduce emotional stress and help with the challenges of living. It is a way of understanding personality in terms of the body and its energetic processes.
According to bioenergetic theory, repressed emotions and desires affect the body by creating chronic muscle tension and a loss of wellbeing and energy. The theory is based on the premise that there is no fundamental separation between the mind and the body: that psychological stress reflects and creates what is happening physically, and physical or somatic events both reflect and create mental and emotional states. Emotional stress from many areas - relationships, family crises, jobs, health - produce tension in the body. Contractions in the muscular system are often the result of carrying unresolved emotional tension. These contractions can have a direct effect on the energy level of the individual, on the capacity for spontaneous and creative self-expression, and on feelings of wellbeing.
Bioenergetic analysis seeks to bring about the conscious integration of mind and body. Therefore, the focus is on both the psychological issues presented and the manifestation of these issues as shown in the individual’s body, energy and movement. Bodywork is combined with psychoanalysis of dreams and childhood experiences.
BIOFEEDBACK
Biofeedback is the measuring of vital bodily functions that are normally unconscious, such as breathing, brain-wave rhythms, heart rate and blood pressure, through information provided by electronic devices. This information is then used to help control these processes. Biofeedback is a relatively new field, emerging only during the 1960s. Since that time biofeedback has been used in parapsychology for psi testing.
Originally biofeedback was applied to brain waves. Brain waves were first discovered in 1924 by Hans Berger, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that it was thought possible to control them at will - in 1958, researcher Joe Kamilya was able to help college students control their alpha brain waves. By the early 1970s the attention of researchers turned to how biofeedback could help one achieve altered states of consciousness, such as those achieved in meditation, and how in meditation bodily processes could be changed. Other experiments concentrated on training subjects to alter involuntary processes, such as blood pressure.
To monitor physiological processes, biofeedback electrodes, which look like stickers with wires attached to them, are placed on the client’s skin. The client is then instructed to use relaxation, meditation or visualization to bring about the desired response, whether it is muscle relaxation, a lowered heart rate or lower skin temperature. The biofeedback device reports progress by a change in the speed of beeps or flashes, or pitch or quality of the tone. The results of biofeedback are measured in the following ways:
Skin temperature.
Electrical conductivity of the skin, called the glavanic skin response.
Muscle tension, with an electromyograph (EMG).
Heart rate, with an electrocardiograph (ECG).
Brain-wave activity, with an electroencephalograph (EEG).
Biofeedback demonstrates the connection between mind and body by teaching subjects to use thoughts and relaxation to control bodily process, and as a result it is typically used as an alternative medicine technique to treat health problems ranging from stress-related disorders to raised blood pressure, chronic pain, addiction and asthma. Biofeedback can also teach people how to increase their alpha brain waves. The alpha state is not necessary for psychic experience, but studies have shown it is conducive to it, since subjects who can slip easily into alpha states tend to score high in psi testing.
BIRDS
Birds appearing in dreams are thought to represent spirits, angels, transcendence and the supernatural. In mythology birds are messengers from the spirit world, souls of the dead or carriers of souls of the dead. In European folklore black birds, such as crows and ravens, that cross your path or gather near your house are thought to be death omens.
BLACK ELK, NICHOLAS [1863—195-0]
Black Elk was an Oglala Sioux mystic born in December 1863 on the Little Powder River, South Dakota. He was the son of the elder Black Elk and White Cow Sees Woman, and he devoted his life to helping his people find unity and strength.
From an early age Black Elk knew he was destined for great things. Around the age of four he began to hear voices, and a year later he had his first psychic vision. Aged nine he had his great vision, in which he was empowered by the Grandfathers, who represented the powers of the world. For two days he fell ill, and during this time he went in an out-of-body experience to the clouds, where he was greeted by the Grandfathers. They took him to the centre of the universe and gave him supernatural power to heal. The Grandfathers showed him the sacred hoop of his people, which represented their soul, and in the centre was a crossroads: one path, the red one, was sacred, while the other, black path was the path of materialism. A voice told Black Elk that he had been given his nation’s hoop and it was up to him to set them on the right path.
From the day of his vision Black Elk changed. He found he had prophetic visions and he could understand the songs of birds and animals. He used his great powers of healing and wisdom to help his people rediscover their traditions.
During Black Elk’s young adulthood, missionaries tried to convert the Oglala Sioux to Christianity, often by force. Black Elk himself was baptized Nicholas Black Elk on 6 December 1904, near present-day Pine Ridge, South Dakota, but his Lakota spirituality remained strong throughout his life. He took part in the underground movement supporting traditional religion, which became necessary after the US government outlawed native rituals. Throughout his life, he took part in both secret traditional practices and public Catholic rites.
Black Elk feared that US policies would destroy the Lakota Nation’s identity, so during the summer of 1930 he dictated his life story to John Neihardt. The resulting book, Black Elk Speaks, was published in 1932 and has been reprinted many times. In it Black Elk described the history of the Lakota Nation and provided a sense of hope for the future. His vision eventually became a message to the Lakota people - a warning not to assimilate completely and thereby lose their unique heritage.
Although Black Elk died in 1950, long before the passage of the Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978, his teachings, combined with this legislation, created a new respect for and interest in Lakota spirituality.
BLACK MAGIC
The use of supernatural and psychic power for evil ends, the opposite of white magic, which is concerned with healing and promoting what is good.
The term ‘black magic’ has been used with a wide variety of meanings and evokes such a variety of reactions that it has become vague and almost meaningless. It is often synonymous with three other multivocal terms: witchcraft, the occult and sorcery. The only similarity among its various uses is that it refers to human efforts to manipulate the supernatural with negative intent and the selfish use of psychic power for personal gain. Workers of black magic are thought to have but one goal: to satisfy their own desires at whatever cost to others.
Magic, good or evil, is universal, with no ethnic or racial association, and it is unfortunate that not just in Western civilization but many cultures around the world, good and evil have for centuries been denoted as white and black. White often designates healing, truth, purity, light and positive energy, while black is darkness, falsehood, evil and negative energy.
In modern times probably the most popular synonym for black magic is the occult. Originally the term meant hidden, hence mysterious, and was routinely used by classical and medieval scholars to refer to ‘sciences’ such as astrology, alchemy and kabbalah, but from the late nineteenth century, when magical sects such as the Order of the Golden Dawn emerged, the term began to take on the meaning of evil or satanic. Perhaps the best-known occultist and black magic practitioner was Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), who dubbed himself the Antichrist. More than any other person Crowley gave the occult an evil connotation.
See also Magic, Occult, Witchcraft, Satanism, Sorcery.
BLACK SHUCK
Spectral dogs in general play a role in many haunting legends and it is reported that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle based his story The Hound of the Baskervilles on accounts of the Black Shuck legends.
Black Shuck is alleged to be a phantom dog in British folklore that has frequently been sighted in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Devon. The common name of this ghostly animal varies according to locality: ‘Old Shuck’ (Norfolk), ‘Old Shock’ (Suffolk), ‘Yeth’ (Devon), ‘Pooka’ (Ireland), ‘Barguest’ (Yorkshire), to name but a few. His appearance is often considered a death omen.
The origins of Black Shuck remain shrouded in mystery, but the stories probably originated from the hound of the Viking raiders’ god Odin and from the Celtic legends of Arawn, whose hounds of hell searched for human souls. The name Black Shuck may have originated from a local word, shucky, meaning ‘shaggy’, or an Anglo-Saxon term scucca, meaning ‘satan’ or ‘demon’. Other local names have been ‘Galley Trot’, ‘Old Snarleyow’ and ‘Old Scarfe’.
Black Shuck is described as being black, and the size of a very large dog or even a small calf. It is reported to have large, saucer-shaped eyes of red or yellow. In some instances it has been reported as being headless or having just one large Cyclops-type eye and to wear a collar or chain, which rattles as it moves.
The hound is said to roam graveyards and lonely country roads, and on stormy nights its howling can be heard. It is believed to leave no footprints, but its icy breath can be felt. To see or even hear the phantom animal is thought to be a foreboding of misfortune, madness or death. In parts of Devon even speaking its name is thought to bring misfortune. In Suffolk, though, it is thought that Black Shuck is harmless as long as it is not bothered. In Cambridgeshire, Black Shuck is said to have favourite haunts along the banks of the river Ouse and in the flat landscape of the fens.
There is little evidence of Black Shuck causing anyone any harm on contact, but there is a curious account of an attack back in 1577 in the parish of Bungay, Suffolk. The parishioners were at church when the church darkened and a violent storm broke out. Black Shuck appeared from nowhere in the middle of the congregation. It charged through the church, causing mass panic, and killing two men who were kneeling in prayer. A third man is thought to have died from severe burns. At the same time, a few miles away in Blythburgh, another black dog reputedly appeared out of nowhere in the local church, killed three men and left burn marks on the church door.
BLAKE, WILLIAM [175-7–1827]
William Blake was a mystic, poet, artist and engraver whose visionary art was much misunderstood by his contemporaries. He published his first set of poems when he was 26, and six years later, in 1789, he printed the Songs of Innocence, which he also engraved and illustrated. In his forties he wrote his more symbolic epic poems, Milton and Jerusalem, and his best-known illustrations of the Book of Job and Dante’s Divine Comedy were created in the last few years of his life.
Blake lived and died in relative poverty. He received little formal schooling, which makes his visionary interpretations of the Bible and the classics all the more remarkable. From a young age he experienced visions; when he was ten he told his father he had seen hosts of angels in a tree, and when his brother, Robert, died at the age of 20, he saw his soul ‘ascend heavenward clapping its hands for joy’. Throughout his life Blake drew his strength from the spirit world. He believed deeply in the human imagination - indeed, that it was the only reality - and he often spoke with the apparitions, angels, devils and spirits that he drew and engraved in his work. His interest in the spirit world brought him into contact with many of the visionaries and writers of his time, such as Emanuel Swedenborg.
BLAVATSKY, MADAME [1831–1891]
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, daughter of Russian aristocrats, was a key figure in the nineteenth-century revival of occult and esoteric knowledge. A highly intelligent and energetic woman, she helped to spread Eastern philosophies and mystical ideas to the West and tried to give the study of the occult a scientific and public face.
Blavatsky became aware of her psychic abilities at an early age. She travelled through the Middle East and Asia learning psychic and spiritual techniques from various teachers, and she said that it was in Tibet that she met the secret masters or adepts who sent her to carry their message to the world.
In 1873 Helena immigrated to New York, where she impressed everyone with her psychic feats of astral projection, telepathy, clairvoyance, clairsentience and clairaudience. Her powers were never tested scientifically, but her interests were always more in the laws and principles of the psychic world than psychic power itself. In 1874 Helena met and began a lifelong friendship with Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, a lawyer and journalist who covered spiritual phenomena, and a year later they founded a society ‘to collect and diffuse a knowledge of the laws which govern the Universe’. They called this society the Theosophical Society, from theosophy, a Greek term meaning ‘divine wisdom’ or ‘wisdom of the gods’.
Travelling to India, Blavatsky and Olcott established themselves at Adyar, near Madras, and a property they bought there eventually became the world headquarters of the society. They established the nucleus of the movement in Britain and founded no fewer than three Theosophical Societies in Paris.
Throughout her life Blavatsky’s powers were dismissed as fraud and trickery, but this did not stop the Theosophical Society from finding a home among intellectuals and progressive thinkers of her day. The society was born at a time when spiritualism was popular and Darwin’s theory of evolution was undermining the Church’s teachings, so the Society’s new thinking flourished. Many people appreciated the alternative it provided both to church dogma and to a materialistic view of the world.
Blavatsky’s two most important books are Isis Unveiled and her magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine, published in 1888. She drew her teachings from many religious traditions: Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism, Platonic thought, Jewish Kabbalah and the occult and scientific knowledge of her time. Although they influenced many people, her books are extremely difficult to read. Nevertheless, her teachings were absorbed by many people and then simplified into a worldview that was taken up by many later New Age groups. This worldview includes a belief in seven planes of existence; the gradual evolution and perfecting of spiritual principles; the existence of nature spirits (‘devas’); and belief in secret spiritual masters or adepts from the Himalayas, or from the spiritual planes, who guide the evolution of humanity. All of these beliefs are derived from Blavatsky’s Theosophy.
BLOCKED ENERGY
Energy is believed to be the basis of all matter, and psychics and alternative medicine practitioners believe that a field of energy, called an aura, surrounds your body and a flow of energy (‘chi’) exists within it. If these energy forces are interrupted for some reason the energy becomes blocked and will not flow freely. Chakras are an essential part of this energy flow. If one or more of them is closed, then the energy is blocked at these points.
It is thought that blocked energy which is not cleared can lead to serious consequences, affecting your mental, physical and spiritual health, and impeding your spiritual and psychic development.
See Energy balancing.
BODHISATTVA
In Buddhism, the bodhisattva is an enlightened being who instead of going straight to nirvana - and not being reborn -decides to delay eternal bliss in order to help others on the path.
The concept of a bodhisattva can be used to describe anyone who is dedicated to compassion and the greater good. In many ways it could be said there is a bodhisattva nature in every one of us.
BODY SCANNING
The ability to look psychically into and around a human body in order to determine the person’s heath and state of mind. Body scanning can be experienced through any of the five senses.
A medical intuitive can psychically read a body and come up with a diagnosis in actual medical terms. Each intuitive works differently, for example, some read auras while others read energetically the insides (organs, blood, glands) of our insides. Intuited information can then be provided to the client’s medical doctor and/or health care professional for further evaluation and discussion of possible treatments. Many medical intuitives work with, or are, medical doctors themselves.
BODYWORK
Alternative medicine therapies that take into account the role of the mind and emotions in physical health and look especially at how the body interacts with the environment and universal life energies.
There are many types of bodywork therapies, involving manipulation, massage, movement, breathing, energy balancing and energy transfer. All these therapies assume the existence of a universal life force and the ability of the body to self-heal when therapy stimulates that life force.
See: Acupuncture, Acupressure, Bioener-getics, Energy balancing, Massage, Reflexology, Reiki, Shiatsu, Therapeutic touch.
BOGEY
Also referred to as the bogeyman in British folklore, this is said to be an evil spirit who loves to cause trouble. The bogey is believed to travel alone or in groups, and in some instances they are synonymous with the devil. Usually the bogey is described as big and nasty and for years the threat of calling upon the bogeyman was used by parents to frighten children into good behaviour.
The precise origins of the bogeyman legend are unknown but it is possible that it came from the old Central European gods. The Slavic for god is ‘bog’ and after Christianity came to Central Europe and made its way to the British Isles, many of the deities in the old religions became transformed into evil spirits. It is possible that the gods of pre-Christian Britain became known as these horrible, frightening beings - bogs, bogeys, boggles or boggarts.
The boggart is a type of bogey hobgoblin in British folklore with poltergeist characteristics. A boggart is said to be helpful, but most of the time it is devious and frightening, never appearing but playing tricks on people, such as knocking books off shelves or tripping people up. It is also thought to punch, scratch and kick. In parts of Yorkshire the threat of being thrown into the ‘baggart hole’ is still used today by parents if their children aren’t behaving.
BOLEYN, ANNE [1501–1536]
Anne Boleyn was the second wife of Henry VIII, and their marriage changed the course of English history. Her larger-than-life story is matched by the many sightings of her ghost since her death.
Besotted with the beautiful Anne, Henry asked the Catholic Church for a divorce from Catherine of Aragon. The Church refused, so in order to marry Anne, Henry created a reformed version of the church, making himself the head - a direct challenge to the authority of the Pope. Having obtained his divorce and married Anne, Henry was determined to have a son, but Anne gave birth to a girl, Elizabeth, in 1533, and from then on the relationship between Anne and Henry deteriorated. Henry found a new love interest in Jane Seymour. Anne became pregnant again, but the child was stillborn. Henry, determined to rid himself of Anne, fabricated a charge of treason and confined her to the Tower of London. Her execution took place on 19 May 1536.
Anne Boleyn is reputed to haunt Hampton Court - along with many of Henry’s other five wives - and the Tower of London where she was executed. Predictably, she has been seen there as a headless female figure near the Queen’s House, where she was confined prior to her execution. At Blickling Hall in Norfolk, Anne’s family home, there have been sightings of a headless young woman riding a horse and carrying a severed head on her lap, typically on the anniversary of her death. Anne has also been sighted in the Hall’s corridors. An administrator reported seeing a woman walking down towards the lake wearing an old grey gown with a white lace collar and cap. He thought she was either lost or trespassing and went out to ask if she was looking for someone. The woman replied, ‘That for which I seek has long since gone.’ Then, in a moment, she disappeared.
BOND, FREDERICK BLIGH [1864-1945]
Born in Wiltshire, England, in 1864, Frederick Bligh Bond became a well-known author, editor, architect and archaeologist. Considered to be the pioneer of ‘psychic questing’, he was regarded as exceptionally talented but ‘irascible, eccentric, difficult to work with, moody and confrontational’ by his colleagues. He had a deep interest in all things psychic, occult and esoteric, and his work involved analysing medieval woodwork and construction techniques.
In 1908 Bond was commissioned to excavate the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, burial place of three kings of England and reputed to have connections to the legendary King Arthur and the Holy Grail. It was while working on this project that Bond claimed to have been in communication with spirit monks, called the Watchers, who once had lived at Glastonbury. The Watchers established regular communications with Bond and allegedly penned messages to Bond in a curious mixture of Old English and rudimentary Latin, giving clues to the hidden history of Glastonbury Abbey and insights into the building’s original design and architecture. In all, these communications gave a startling insight into everyday life within the abbey and a glimpse back into the medieval world.
Bond’s claim to have psychic guidance from spirits drew sharp criticism from his conventional colleagues in both the fields of archaeology and architecture. But his communications with the ghostly monks won him the support of members of the British Society for Psychical Research. In 1918 he published The Gate of Remembrance, a collection of transcripts and reports from his automatic writing sessions, and it sealed his fate by firmly undermining his reputation as a professional once and for all. However, Bond’s enthusiasm for his interaction with the ghosts of Glastonbury Abbey prompted him to follow up his book with The Hill of Vision, in which he revealed allegedly prophetic warnings given to him by the spectral monks, including a prediction of World War I.
